# Amazon Aurora vs Crunchy Bridge

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-crunchy-bridge/

Every value below is read from Amazon Aurora's and Crunchy Bridge's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Amazon Aurora | Crunchy Bridge |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pricing model | Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend. | Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. |
| Regions | 34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total. | 37 regions across three clouds — 16 on AWS, 14 on Google Cloud, 7 on Azure — counted from the region tables on Crunchy's own plans page, which lists them and publishes no total. |
| Engine | MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database. | PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. |
| Database branching | Limited — clones, not a branch workflow | Limited — a new cluster restored from backup, to any minute in 10 days |
| Point-in-time recovery | Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken. | Any minute inside the 10 days of retained backups. The WAL is streamed every 60 seconds or 16 MB, whichever comes first, and a restore produces a fork of the cluster rather than replacing it. |
| Read replicas | Supported — 15 per cluster, a quota AWS will not raise | Supported |
| Backup retention | 1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off. | 10 days, included in the cluster price rather than sold as a tier, and extendable by configuring additional daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to keep. |

## Where they differ

### Pricing model

- Amazon Aurora: Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/))
- Crunchy Bridge: Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))

### Regions

- Amazon Aurora: 34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Concepts.RegionsAndAvailabilityZones.html))
- Crunchy Bridge: 37 regions across three clouds — 16 on AWS, 14 on Google Cloud, 7 on Azure — counted from the region tables on Crunchy's own plans page, which lists them and publishes no total. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))

### Engine

- Amazon Aurora: MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_AuroraOverview.html))
- Crunchy Bridge: PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/))

### Point-in-time recovery

- Amazon Aurora: Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html))
- Crunchy Bridge: Any minute inside the 10 days of retained backups. The WAL is streamed every 60 seconds or 16 MB, whichever comes first, and a restore produces a fork of the cluster rather than replacing it. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/backups))

### Backup retention

- Amazon Aurora: 1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html))
- Crunchy Bridge: 10 days, included in the cluster price rather than sold as a tier, and extendable by configuring additional daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to keep. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/backups))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Amazon Aurora if Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.

Consider something else: Amazon Aurora — You want the upstream database rather than a compatible one, or a branch workflow rather than a clone. AWS documents cloning as a way to build a test environment, not as something you do per pull request.

Consider something else: Crunchy Bridge — You need a free plan to start on, or a second database engine later. This is a single-engine paid service.

## Documented by only one

- Free tier: Amazon Aurora: Yes — capped Free plan plus time-limited credits
- Entry paid plan: Crunchy Bridge: $9 a month for Hobby-0 — 2 cores, 512 MB, AWS only. Crunchy says the Hobby tier runs on lower-quality infrastructure, has no PgBouncer and is not intended for production; the first production tier is Standard-4 at $70 a month for 1 core and 4 GB. There is no free plan.
- Managed connection pooling: Crunchy Bridge: Supported
- Scales to zero: Amazon Aurora: Supported — serverless capacity mode only
- Rewind in place: Amazon Aurora: Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only
- ISO 27001: Amazon Aurora: Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.
- HIPAA: Amazon Aurora: Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.
- GDPR / data residency: Amazon Aurora: AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Should I choose Amazon Aurora or Crunchy Bridge?**

Pick Amazon Aurora if Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.
Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.